I Was Wrong: From the Memoirs of Richard Alpert
by Haiza Tyri
Summary: After leaving the Island, Richard writes his memoirs and reflects on his relationship with Ben Linus. Friendship/fatherhood/mistakes/betrayal. Always non-slash.
1. I was wrong

I was wrong.

_Dios mio_, forgive me. I was so wrong.

I, who saw what his father did to him—I was no better. His father destroyed his childhood; I destroyed his adulthood.

I was so sure. I saw a savior in him, a little boy. He was never intended to be a savior. Whatever he was intended to be, I destroyed that.

I am old now. This is a laughable statement. I have been old for over a hundred and fifty years. But now for the first time I am actually old. I have white hair, wrinkles, shaking hands. And I am dying. I, Richardus. So now at last I am ready to face the truth of what I did to an abused child. What I did to Benjamin Linus.

I have avoided it for a long time, but I have never really been able to deny it, these years away from the Island. They have been very clarifying years. I have seen that at many times I was really a very stupid man, seeing what I wanted to see and doing what I wanted to do. Needing God to forgive me, I turned to mortals to give me meaning. I saw in Jacob a god, when he was only a mystically powerful man, not too much unlike me, perhaps, given a power he did not completely understand. I saw in Ben a savior, when he was only a clever, confused child.


	2. One of us

The first time I saw him, he was just a boy, a pale, thin, big-eyed child in dangerous territory, breaking the Truce and caring nothing for it. My first impulse was to scare him into running home before he started a war, until I saw the look in his eyes. He had seen things. So I spoke to him and learned that he too had spoken with the dead. The Dharma people didn't do that. Clearly the Island had marked this boy out as one of its own, which meant I had a responsibility. I sent him home, because we could not at that time afford a war with the Dharma invaders, but I promised him he would be one of us one day.

I thought about him often over the next few years. I wondered what the Island had in store for him, why Jacob had never told me about him, not that Jacob had ever told me everything, though I think he liked carrying on conversations with me, the ignorant Islander. As I came into conflict more and more with Charles Widmore, who didn't like to listen to anyone but himself, I thought about Ben more and more. A hundred years of living with people will give you a certain insight into them, and I saw in Ben the greatest intellect ever to come to the Island from Outside. This boy could lead. He could do better than Charles, who had a tendency to alienate people with his overbearing arrogance. What else had he been sent to me for than to provide a replacement for Charles?

My second encounter with him only seemed to confirm it. Two of the strange Dharma members brought him to me for help. When I say strange, I mean they were strange even for Dharma folk. Time travelers, they claimed to be, and certain it was that they had knowledge unexplainable any other way. With the Dharma Initiative but not of it, they seemed to me, like Ben himself, who lay unconscious and bleeding in the man's arms. They had absolute trust that I could help him, and why? Because they knew from the future that I had? Perhaps this boy was even more significant to the Island than I had thought.

And so the reasons and justifications spiral round each other. All the circumstances confirmed themselves, because I wanted them to.

Some part of my judgment told me not to take the boy into the Temple. No one, not even I, knew much about the Temple, why it was there, what that force was inside it that changed people. Ben had a kind of veiled but sweet innocence in his eyes, and the Temple would take that away from him. But he was meant to be one of us, and I was willing to defy his father, the whole Dharma Initiative, Charles, and possibly even Jacob to save his life and help him become what I was so sure he was meant to be.

I will not discuss here what the Temple—the force inside the Temple—did to him. I know he did not remember later, and it will remain unremembered. I will say only that when he opened his eyes long afterward, there was understanding in them there had not been before, more than a boy of twelve or so ought to have. He has always since then had the most intimate knowledge and understanding of the Island, sometimes more so even than I. But he did not remember anything that had happened recently. He did not remember being shot, nor being brought to us, nor the temple. All he remembered was me, our previous meeting, and for a time he thought it was that day and that I had actually taken him back to our camp the first time we met. He had only a hazy recollection of the few years that had passed.

I judged it best that he should stay with us for a short time, for the times were strange. I was pulled one direction and another by the time travelers, Charles, and Eloise and finally, oddly, found myself helping the man who had shot Ben find a nuclear bomb on the say-so of a man who never changed, like me, and whom Eloise murdered, only to learn he was her time-traveling son with whom she was currently pregnant. It was all very confusing, and despite my many years and long association with Jacob, I did not understand any of it. I am not a physicist; indeed it is only in my recent years off the Island that I have learned what physics is.

Charles, who had seen what the Temple did to Ben and finally recognized that he belonged to us, agreed to watch over him while Eloise and I performed our task, and when we returned, we took Ben and all the rest of our people and withdrew as far as possible from Dharma territory. They were going to detonate a nuclear bomb. I knew as well as anyone, thanks to the military incursions twenty years before, that this would extinguish us all. Was this not precisely why we had killed the military team who brought the bomb? Protect the Island was the overriding purpose. So why had I helped? The only answer I can give is that the Island knew what it was doing.

Obviously, since I am writing this, it did not extinguish us all. Probably the only person who can explain why was an odd, nervous young man Eloise killed, her own child. I knew him as a small boy and never failed to be in awe of his intellect. I can only speculate that the bomb did not totally destroy the Island because it had been dropped directly into a pocket of electromagnetic energy of the sort that riddled the Island. The Island seems to have a kind of sentience, and these pockets seem to be part of it, as they are part of its ability to move through time. Nevertheless, all these wise words don't mean I have the slightest idea what I'm talking about. I understand the Island on a visceral level that is not often translated into intellectual lucidity.

We did not die. We lived through a period of turmoil when the Island shook and some kinds of plants died and others did not, when new kinds of animals most of us had never seen before ran loose from Dharma cages (Ben and Charles said they were called polar bears and rabbits). Of two people Charles sent to spy on Dharma activity, one died of some horrific disease, and the other found that a missing toe had grown back. Our Island was changing, and we could only hold on and hope we weren't the ones who died.

Ben was the only one who seemed to thrive in the turmoil. Or maybe it was only being with us that made him thrive. He took to our outdoor life as if he had been born a woodsman, he absorbed our learning and lore about the Island and took the story about Jacob with clear-eyed and yet simple trust. In short, he was one of us, perhaps the best of us, and, naturally, he rebelled when I told him he had to go home when only a month had passed.

The Island had settled down. The sky had stopped periodically going purple, the plants had stopped dying, and no one else Charles sent to spy died. Soon the enemy would have a chance to remember that one of their children had been kidnapped. I told him all this, and eventually he accepted it, and then I told him the real reason I was sending him back.

"We need a man in their camp who can tell us what's going on."

His eyes shone. He was a twelve-year-old boy, after all. "Like a spy? A secret agent?"

"Exactly. You have to act exactly like one of them, Ben. You have to be glad to be there and relieved to have escaped from us. Do you understand?"

He nodded.

"You have a brilliant mind," I told him. "Study well, and maybe they will allow you to join one of their stations and learn its secrets."

He shook his head with a small, curious smile. "Oh, no," he said. "I'm going to become a workman, like my dad."

I stared at him. I knew full well how much he hated his father. He grinned at me.

"Workmen go _everywhere,_ Richard. They see everything. They go wherever something needs fixed or cleaned, and everything always needs fixed or cleaned. I will have the secrets of all the stations, not just one."

I was pleased with his foresight and clear decision making. "We're going to have to make it look like this time has been bad for you, but not so bad they're going to want to come after us. Do you understand what I mean?"

"You mean you're going to have to beat me up."

"Yes. I'm sorry."

He rolled his eyes at me. "Richard, I've been beat up before, and it was never for a good cause. A good cause is worth anything."

He'd stopped being afraid. We'd done that for him, at least, though there was a certain hardness in his lack of fear that had never been there before.

It was his idea to space it out over several days so it would look like it had been ongoing. The first day I punched him in the mouth and gave him a split lip, and he laughed at me. The next day I slapped him so hard it left bruises on his cheeks that were yellow by the next day. The third day I took a sharp stone and carefully gave him a ragged cut on his forehead, as if he'd been knocked down, and he didn't flinch. On the fourth day he judged the preliminary work sufficient and quietly let me beat him up. Not too badly, just enough to make his running scared through the jungle and falling into the some Dharma station look authentic. He said his father would go on a rampage ("No one's allowed to beat me up but him") but that probably no one would listen to him because he was just a janitor.

"And," he said mischievously, "he'll feel so bad about all this that he won't hit me for maybe a month. So really you're doing me a favor."

Favor or not, I did it without sentimentality, and then when I had sent him off into the jungle, I went away and was sick.


	3. One of them

Isabella had a child once. I was a father two whole days before it died. It was a girl, named simply Maria, the most common of all Spanish names. Her birthing nearly killed Isabella, and all for nothing, for two days of watching her die. After that the price of children seemed too much. It was not a price I was willing to pay again. On the Island I always paid close attention to the children so that I would be able to identify our next leader, but I never became involved in their lives. Until Ben. Until I sent him back into the enemy's camp with my handiwork on his face and realized that I wished more to protect him from them than I did to gain the information he would provide us.

I scorned my sentimentality. Ben was intended to serve the Island, not to fulfill my need for a son, which need I didn't even have. I think I succeeded in keeping our relationship unsentimental, because Ben always saw me as a friend and a mentor, not a father. I used to think this was a good thing, but now I am not so sure. If our relationship had had more emotional substance, perhaps we would not each have betrayed each other as easily as we did. I helped make him into the sort of man who could betray me and whom I could betray.  
>Anyway, who am I fooling? I was too scared to make him my son, so instead for a while I set him up as a kind of demigod.<p>

As he had predicted, his father went into a wild rage when he returned to the Barracks bloodied and professing loss of memory about what had happened to him in the last month. Roger Linus tried to stir the Dharma people up into an attack on us, but they were far too busy trying to contain their electromagnetic Incident to pay any attention to their janitor. Then he wanted to take him away from the Island, but Ben protested strongly, pretending a sickening enthusiasm for the Dharma Initiative. They also didn't want to let him go. He offered them a unique opportunity to study how a child would grow under circumstances that prevented women from living through pregnancy. As a child he fooled all the eyes watching him, and there were many, for he was the only child in the Dharma Initiative. All the children had been sent away before the Incident while he was still with me in the Temple, and no children were born after that. It must have been surreal for him.

Now that no schoolteachers were needed, he was left to glean any learning that he could mostly on his own. This contributed to his being able to learn vast amounts while pretending to learn fairly little. He flunked tests, purposefully achieved lower IQ scores, and in every way made certain he earned his place as workman beside his father. Once he grew older, no one thought about him very much.

His lonely, unsupervised life and his father working all the time gave him latitude for sneaking away alone. He came out to meet with me monthly. I taught him our ways, our Latin, our fighting style, all about Jacob. In return he told me all about what he learned about Dharma research. It was infuriating that they were learning more about the Island than I knew, but Ben was the perfect spy. Sometimes those days it seemed like I learned more from Ben and the Dharma Initiative than from Jacob. He told me about the desperate rush to build the Swan station and equip it, about the Orchid's careful research into the forces deep inside it, about the Flame's communication with the Outside world I knew nothing about, about the submarine and the Dharma Initiative's vast resources. Naturally I communicated these things to Charles and did not know that he had dreams to build himself an empire with them.

Charles was always concerned that Ben was going to be seduced by the Initiative and become a double agent against us, but then, Charles never did trust anyone but himself. Not even Jacob. He'd even manage to alienate Eloise, his staunchest supporter for a long time.

I, however, never doubted what was in Ben's heart while he was with the Initiative. Charles had never seen (I took care that he should not) the one time he came to me sobbing at age thirteen and begging to come back to us. He had never seen him unfolding to me plans for sabotaging the Initiative, a gleam in his eye. He had not seen the eyes of him when he first woke up in the Temple. No, Ben Linus had never been one of them, and continued exposure only increased his impatience to leave them behind. He only submitted to my insistence that he learn all he could from them, and as he grew into a young man, I watched him grow into deep, deliberate patience and insight.


	4. A tremendous amount of patience

The Purge was Charles' plan. I am not laying the blame for it solely on him, for all of us who took part in it were equally culpable. How can I explain what it was like for us whose whole lives were bound up in the Island, watching this band of Outsiders gradually taking more and more of our territory, doing experiments on Our Island—it was like watching them do it on our children, or our father—being called by them Hostiles or Savages for protecting what was ours?

Nevertheless, we slaughtered several hundred people, including the more defenseless among them. Was there no other way to defend ourselves?

Charles, I am certain, was not plagued with these doubts. Nor was I, at that time. Neither, for that matter, was Ben. He had friends among the people he lived with, I believe, if the kinds of relationships he cultivated could be called friendships. He had a father.

When I first told him about the plan for the Purge, I asked him what he wanted us to do with Roger Linus. I gave him the option for the man to remain alive, though I know Charles would not have approved. Charles never did understand that I did not answer to him. Ben did.

He lifted his head and fixed his large blue eyes on me. He was just a young man. I don't remember what year it was. Dates have always been a curiously slippery concept with me. But I remember that he was young, in age and in body but not in mind.

"I'll take care of him myself," he said.

"Take care of him?" I asked, wanting to know his precise intentions. I thought it would be right and proper for him to be the one to kill his father. It would be a fitting sacrifice to the Island and a kind of initiation into our life. I had become oddly pagan in those days. I wonder if Jacob knew, if he even cared. He was so very removed from events, until he was forced by his approaching death to enter them.

"How do you intend to carry out this purge?" Ben asked.

"We thought gas. We have some left over from when we eliminated the American military several decades ago. Do you think you could get us more from Dharma stores?"

He nodded. "Tell me the day and time, and that day I'll take my father aside and do it myself."

"Do what, Ben?" I asked again.

He looked me in the eyes. "Kill him. I'll kill him myself. I want him to know it's me doing it. I want him to know why."

I wondered if he really could. If he could, it would only prove what he was meant to be.

On the day of the Purge, Charles insisted on leading the team that would take out Hydra Island (the true seat of power, he said) and gave me leadership of the team going to the Barracks. Eloise led the Orchid team, Tom Friendly the Flame team, and so forth.

We entered Dharma territory at 3pm. Ben had given me the day's code to the sonic fence, and we passed in easily, without detection. No one caught us in the jungle; the Dharma folk rarely went into their own jungle, and with good reason. We approached the Barracks with great caution, as only we knew how to do, and at 4 o'clock we pulled on our gas masks and threw our gas grenades into the little neighborhood. Then we ran up to the buildings and threw them into windows and doors. In moments, everyone was dead.

We checked each of the buildings and then all came out into the center of the little village. Ben was there in his silly Dharma jumpsuit and gas mask, standing and staring around at all the dead. People he'd known. I timed the dissipation of the gas and took off my mask, and as all the others followed suit, he did too. His eyes were wide, a little shell-shocked. He'd never killed before. His father was his first.

Did I say before that Ben lost his innocence when I took him into the Temple? I realized that day I was wrong. He'd still had some shred of it locked deep inside, until I helped him finally kill it the day of the Purge. But at least his waiting was over. He was finally one of us.


	5. Sleep tight, Charles

Ben and I began immediately to plan our overthrow of Charles. Charles was a problem. He had come to view the Island as his, not as Jacob's or as a place he had a sort of stewardship of. I have read Tolkien's _The Lord Of the Rings_ recently, and I found the Lord Denethor to be very much like Charles, only Charles had no sons to care for. True, Daniel was said to be his son, but he never paid him any attention, not even as much as Denethor paid Faramir. Eloise took Daniel away to Los Angeles as soon as we had control of the Dharma submarine, ostensibly to help take over the remaining Dharma stations there, but primarily to get him away from Charles and to help him fulfill his destiny as revealed by his older self. So Charles was left with no leavening influence in the woman who insisted on reminding everyone that they had a greater destiny.

He had long ago begun to act like an autocrat and was gradually moving to despot. Though he had lived on the Island most of his life, he was still culturally very old-world British. The first time I encountered certain attitudes in British literature (Sir Leicester Dedlock comes to mind) I was astonished to recognize Charles. He barely respected my position, thinking it subordinate to his own, and even Jacob he treated as many of the old noblesse of England did the idea of God, as a nominal authority they gave lip service to while in every way following their own wills. Once he was able to leave the Island, he thought he had the right to live however he desired, since Jacob supposedly could not see him. Whatever I may now think about Jacob's true nature, the reality of what kind of being he was, he was our true authority, the one who protected the Island and gave us our duties to do the same. If Charles could not obey, he did not deserve leadership.

I wanted it to be Ben's overthrow of Charles, not mine. My life was not wholly bound up in the lives and doings of the Islanders. I was first Jacob's emissary, second one of them, a little separate, a little separated. I called them my people, but the Islanders had to be Ben's people, never really mine. Ben never needed me prodding him anyway. We planned together and he consulted me, but he always knew his own mind, and he could see as well as I could that Charles had to go.

Charles knew Ben was a threat. He'd known it since the day I insisted on taking him into the Temple. He tried to cultivate him, possibly as a successor rather than a usurper, but Ben would not be cultivated, not even by me. Ben was Ben, and he would not be made into anything else.

Unable to bribe, win over, or cultivate Ben, Charles tried to break him down, and Ben only laughed at him. Not to his face. Even Ben did not laugh in Charles' face. But behind his back, definitely, and defied him the way he had never allowed himself to defy his father. Charles once locked him up for four days without food and water in an empty shark tank on Hydra Island. Ben used it as an opportunity to test his own endurance, emerging nearly dead and triumphant, though disapproving of my efforts to free him. Charles sent him to kill a woman and a baby, and instead he took the baby for his own (an action that considerably startled me). Charles even sent him on submarine trips to the Real World in the hope that he would find himself small and insignificant in the face of its immensity. Instead he found it small and the Island he served immense in meaning and implication. He even took the opportunity the trips afforded to create a network for himself that Charles could not touch, beginning with Eloise and the Lamp Post Station, and to establish identities and stashes of money and supplies in case he should ever need them, and to set permanent investigators on Charles' activities when he was away from the Island. He was always far-seeing, and he always had a plan.

Ben's plan was very simple. Charles had a certain number of devoted followers to be dealt with (the rest tended to follow the strongest leader like sheep, not that I had ever seen a sheep), and we wanted to be able to do it without killing them. We didn't kill our own. Ben was confident in his ability to sway most of them, but those he knew he couldn't he persuaded Charles to send to America and England on certain missions, where his own people prevented them from returning. This was a feat of manipulation that I still think of with a certain amount of awe, the first time I truly saw what he was capable of with nothing but his tongue. Did it frighten me then? I can't say. I'm not certain whether I'm projecting feelings on the past or not. I ought to have been frightened, if I wasn't.

After sending away the true loyalists, we seized the rest and locked them up on Hydra Island. Charles was marched straight out to the submarine. There was no fight. No one had an opportunity to fight. Ben had more loyal followers than Charles did. Isabel was one of them. I believe she loved Ben, but she hated Charles more. She would gladly have killed him, but Ben wouldn't let her. The surprise to me was that Ben let him live, for despite what I said about us not killing our own, I thought Charles was too dangerous to keep alive. A few years later he wouldn't have let him live. That one act of mercy undid him in every way—but perhaps it was for his good as well.

Charles was impotent with fury and made all kinds of threats, which he was not able to carry out for a decade and a half. We never thought he would be able to find the Island again. Eloise wasn't going to let him near the Lamp Post. I, for one, had no idea that the young Daniel Eloise killed had come back to the Island on his father's own boat to kidnap Ben and finish the destruction of his life in my future… All I knew was that Ben had won without bloodshed. We put Charles on the submarine and sent him away blithely. The rest of his people Ben slowly persuaded over time that they _wanted_ to join us. Danny Pickett was one of them. So was Tom Friendly, who became what Ben referred to as his butler, though he did none of the tasks of a conventional butler.

And then everything was new. Everything was just as I had seen it must be. Ben was our leader, and the Island would go back to the way it used to be, before Charles, before Dharma, before the Americans.

Nothing was ever the same again. It was a new beginning alright, the beginning of the end—for Jacob, for me, for Ben, for the Island we knew. All along I was slowly pushing events to the destruction of us all.


	6. Good command decisions

_Good command decisions_

I don't mean to say Ben was a bad leader. No, he was a very good one. He unified the Islanders, who had become polarized under Charles; he made them believe implicitly in Jacob, whom Charles had always treated as incidental (I realize now that Jacob didn't really care what Charles thought, until he needed him). He knew what to do in whatever situation faced him; he knew how to mobilize people to action.

He began recruiting people. Our ranks were greatly depleted. Older Islanders had died, no new ones had been born since the Incident, Alex was the only child we had, a number of pregnant women had died, Charles' strongest supporters were gone—we were greatly diminished. We also had few people who knew anything about science. Ethan and a few others had been allowed to study in America, but we needed people with longer, more specialized training if we were to pick up studying the Island where the Dharma Initiative left off.

Ben sent me on my first trip to the Real World. I was reluctant at first, because of Jacob's rule, but, as Ben said, we weren't really leaving. We were coming back, with more people. I had never thought about leaving the Island. I had a purpose here and nothing anywhere else, no reason or desire to go back to the Canary Islands. My entire world was the Island. Ben thought that was why I should be a recruiter, because I believed so deeply in the Island. So I went to America, that place Isabella and I had dreamed of going, and it was entirely unlike the place we had dreamed of going. It was a bewildering place, and in time I had to learn to ignore everything except what I needed to accomplish. Certain facts, certain places, a certain facility for the culture that I didn't really have. Over the years I did grow used to it, but even now I am an alien in it.

Ben went as well, but never at the same time I did. One of us was always on the Island at any given time, to give our people leadership. He never became attached to that world, as Charles did. He learned it intimately and learned how to manipulate it, but it was never anything more to him than a tool to use. Like me, he always wanted to come back to the Island, where he belonged. But he was an excellent recruiter. He knew how to get people to come—to _want_ to come. Most who came wanted to stay. Those who didn't he found ways to make them stay.

Juliet was a rare exception, one he never fully was able to persuade or hypnotize. Anyone who had seen the job he did on Tom Friendly would think a meek, frightened woman like Juliet would be no trouble, but Juliet was a woman who hid far more inside herself than any of us dreamed and had reserves of strength and stubbornness she never dreamed herself. Ben was at a disadvantage with her anyway, being in love with her. He pushed her too hard in some areas and not hard enough in others. He was emotionally compromised and could not see his way clearly as he usually could. The very same thing happened with Alex. He loved her too much to know how to deal with her. Whenever his emotions were involved, he made the wrong decisions.

This can happen to anyone. He made many good decisions as well. He was the one who started us studying the problem of women's pregnancies, who led the Islanders to live in the Barracks, who gave over leadership of the Temple to Dogen as Charles had refused to do, despite Jacob's personal selection of him. He provided unity. In short, he did all those things I had known he could do and once again proved over and over to me that I was right. Of course I was wrong.


End file.
